Are Your Local PPC Ads Really “Local”?

Paid Advertising Platforms are growing exponentially on what seems like a weekly basis. What once was Keywords + Ad + Bid = Money has now become a full-time job. Bid adjustments, rules, remarketing, extensions, day-parting, local or geographic targeting, modified broad match, and more — the vocabulary alone is a struggle for small business owners who do their own marketing.

As I review and overhaul paid advertising campaigns for new clients, I’ve noticed that there are numerous misunderstandings surrounding local paid search advertising in Google and Bing.

Targeting with location extensions, entire campaigns, keywords alone, or some combination thereof? You can see how easy it is to make mistakes here. For small businesses that are going to be handling their own paid advertising maintenance and will manage their account going forward, I set up simple campaigns that target their service areas, and I show them how to monitor those campaigns with custom dashboards and reports in Google Analytics.

First, a few tips on setting up your AdWords targeting. If you target by campaign, you must be sure that you set the radius from your business correctly — if you choose 30 miles instead of 40, are you cutting out potential business? How far customers are willing to travel (or how far you travel) is an important piece of data to have. I recommend you err on the side of a larger radius, because you can always narrow it down if you need to.

In AdWords, you can target people in or talking about your location. I start with this setting, because someone in New York City might be searching for a locksmith for their college-age daughter in Boston. I may want my ad to come up for that search.

If you find (through analytics) that the people outside of your local area are not converting, you can change this setting to “People in my targeted location.” There are certainly a few other ways to handle geographic targeting in AdWords, though I find this one the easiest to teach to novices who really want to learn how to manage these themselves. There’s less chance for error as they perform day-to-day maintenance on their ads and keywords.

Analytics Setup

Once you’ve set up your AdWords campaigns to target a local business or service area, you must monitor that campaign to make sure your settings are doing their job. I like to set up a local dashboard that tells me the cities that are driving clicks to my website via that local campaign. I can then decide if my radius is too small or too large, and if I need to adjust my location options (shown above).

Because this dashboard is highly customized to your location, I cannot give you a link to a ready-made dashboard you can download. But I can show you how to set up your own dashboard.

Step 1: Make a note of your locally targeted AdWords campaign name. In this case, my campaign name is “Locally Targeted 2013.”

Step 2: Navigate to “Audience,” then to “Demographics,” then the “Locations” tab.

Step 3: Drill down into the “Metro” area you’re targeting. If the metro is too broad, then drill into the cities report within the state you’re looking at.

Step 4: Create a custom segment that shows ONLY traffic to the site from the locally targeted campaign you noted in Step 1. (Again, in my case, “Locally Targeted 2013.”)

With this segment applied to the city or metro report, you’ll see the cities where visitors saw and clicked on your ads. You can move back out to state level and keep the segment in place to see what other states might be looking for information. You can also look at the e-commerce report to see what locations are driving the most revenue through this paid advertising campaign. Here, you can see traffic and revenue for my campaign over the last 30 days via my PPC Campaign that targets locals.

Florida is really the only place driving revenue — but the brand recognition is enough for me to keep the campaign on for the other locations as well. It’s not costing a ton of money, and the second visit (or conversion) could be happening via another source or on the phone. If I was spending a lot on clicks to other states, I might consider narrowing or adjusting my strategy here.

The goal of this report is to determine three things:

Am I really targeting local customers?

Are those local customers converting at a rate that justifies my spend on PPC click?

Should I expand or contract my targeting to improve ROI?

If you’re only seeing clicks in your local area with a few in other parts of the country, then things are working correctly. If you’re seeing clicks from all over the country, something isn’t working right and you should revisit your settings within AdWords.

The same targeting (and reporting) can be done with a Bing Ads campaign, and you can even combine campaigns within the custom segment. By clicking “Email” at the top of your report, you can schedule this report to show up in your email once a week, once a month, or just once if you like. This allows you to have a reminder to look at how things are doing, without the need to create and ignore another calendar reminder!

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Carrie Hill is the co-founder of Ignitor Digital, along with long-time colleague Mary Bowling. At Ignitor, Carrie tackles tough technical SEO roadblocks many small business owners don't even know they have. Her experience with analytics and troubleshooting helps her get to the root of issues. When not working, Carrie loves to cook for friends and family, hang out with her pretty awesome kids, and read books that have little-to-no educational value!